When we talk about cost savings of communications technology, we tend to think about capital expenditure. This is certainly a very valid way to quantify the potential savings. If you’re using a PBX, you’ll notice that unified communications save on procurement, maintenance, repairs and infrastructure provision.
But what if we broadened the scope of what a ‘cost saving’ actually is?
Cost savings through reduced capital expenditure
When you first implement a new telecommunications solution in your business, there are various costs to cover. You’ll need to purchase your infrastructure and communications hardware. That includes the phones that sit on everyone’s desks.
But this is just the start.
Cost savings through productivity
Productivity is a keyword in the IT world, and the cloud is the primary driver of change. You’ve probably already seen dozens of studies that confirm cloud technology elevates output – but how can you put this into figures?
Productivity has a very real effect on your employees and unified communications has a direct influence. One contributor is the ability to adapt the working day to better suit employees’ lifestyles.
Cost savings through increased mobility
With a traditional phone system, you’ll have hardwired phones on the desks of your employees. That was fine a few years ago, but in 2020, few of us always work from one location. Employees are now expected to move around the office and work in an agile and flexible way. New methodologies such as Lean, Kanban Scrum are changing project management forever, removing waste and encouraging employees to speak to each other more often.
Cost savings through increased uptime
Over the last few years, many UK businesses have been hit by chaos caused by natural disasters. The most prominent example of this is flooding, which can destroy a store or office within minutes. Every business needs a disaster recovery plan, and a way to minimise the impact of disaster. Unified communications plays an important role in containing the impact of natural threats and other unexpected outages.
Cost savings through increased collaboration
In the last section, we talked about remote working, and the benefits of mobility. Looking more closely, how does unified communications support collaborative working?
When employees are working from different places, the business needs to ensure that they are still able to collaborate as effective as if they were in the same office. Unified communications brings together all of the tools people need to keep in touch: including voice communication, video calling, instant messaging, whiteboard sessions, web conferencing and more.
Another key part of collaborative working is presence awareness. Using simple control panels and tools, people can set their online status, or be marked as automatically ‘away’.
This combination of different technologies means that employees that are physically separate can work together as though they were in the same room.
Cost savings through obsolescence
In business, how do you cope with the constant need to progress, upgrade and change?
Most businesses know that they need to plan ahead and budget for change, and in a climate of rapid cloud innovation, change is unavoidable. Few businesses would expect to purchase a communications system and expect that system to be at the cutting edge 5 or 10 years later.
There will always be a need to upgrade, replace and evolve the system over time, even if the technology currently in use isn’t technically ‘broken’.
Conclusion
Few businesses approach cloud migration without a degree of trepidation. After all, traditional systems can be ingrained in the company psyche, and some stakeholders may be apprehensive to change. But when you look at the capital expenditure savings, the potential for healthier balance sheets is clear. When you then look beyond this, you see the positive impacts across the business: things that collectively reduce cost and waste.